It will take just over a year for Christine Lopez, a 26-year-old Filipino, to complete the transition from catwalk to the cockpit of an Airbus A320.

If all goes to plan, the former model will become the fastest person to qualify as a commercial airline pilot, under a revolutionary training scheme – the multi-crew pilot licence (MPL) – that was approved last November by the International Civil Aviation Organisation, the sector’s regulatory body. She says: “I started to think that I wanted to fly during my high-school days but I never thought that, once I decided to do it, it could happen this quick.”